The PIAA's transfer rule tweak wasn't enough. It needs to level the post-season playing field | Editorial

If you spend a day under the Capitol dome in Harrisburg, one thing rapidly becomes clear: State law is a fluid thing. While some bedrock principles remain immutable, the specifics of language are updated all the time to reflect updates in technology; shifts in societal norms and new knowledge that bubbles up with startling regularity.

Not so for the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association. Pennsylvania's high school sports sanctioning body has spent more than four decades leaning on a 1970s-vintage law "authorizing private schools to participate with public schools in post-season athletic events.

The end product?

It's now become virtually impossible for smaller public, or so-called "boundary schools," to compete for championships with deep-pocketed private institutions, or "non-boundary" schools, who can recruit the best talent, shower them with financial aid and pile up trophy after post-season trophy.

This week, more than 100 public school superintendents from across Pennsylvania will gather in State College to discuss the possibility of exiting the PIAA rather than be forced to compete on a fundamentally uneven playing field.

The breakaway group has been referred to as "rogues" by officials at the sports-sanctioning body, which really doesn't foster a constructive ground for discussion about an important policy question.

In an olive-branch gesture, the PIAA tweaked its transfer rules last week, adopting language forcing student-athletes who transfer in the 10th grade or later to sit out the next year's postseason in their respective sport unless they can prove a hardship.

But that doesn't change the fact that the PIAA is clearly disinclined to violate both the letter and spirit of that Nixon-era statute. Simply, the organization is not going to "violate the intent of a law that said we're going to take private schools as full members of the PIAA," the organization's executive director, Robert Lombardi, said.

While that sentiment is understandable - the law is the law - that doesn't mean that the two sides shouldn't figuratively beat their swords into field goal uprights and try to reach a mutually acceptable understanding.

That can go one of two ways:

The sanctioning organization can go further than it did with its rules tweak last week and move to more effectively regulate transfers to the charter and private schools that have come to dominate the state's post-season landscape.

Or - and this is the proverbial nuclear option - it can follow the lead of other states and recognize both public and private championships.

After all, the state doesn't regulate utilities the same way it did in 1972. Similarly, there's no reason that the PIAA can't change with the changing times either.